A Washington-backed peer-to-peer site designed to push holes through China’s Great Firewall has managed to accrue nearly 10,000 followers in the past fortnight.

Lantern was not built specifically for China, but such is the appetite for unfettered internet access in the People’s Republic that around three-quarters of its users come from the Middle Kingdom.

The new service, which promises access to sites like Facebook and Twitter which bring “light to corruption and justice”, works like a P2P network, relying on some of its users offer the chance for others to jump onto their virtual private network connection to the open internet.

A video explaining the service had the following:

Lantern is a safe and secure free software that gives people internet access in places where access is denied. It’s software that circumvents government censorship. When you install Lantern on your computer you provide a new escape route for getting information in and out of censored countries. You’re giving people a way out; a way to communicate, a way to mobilise.

However, one user @zuihulu ( https://twitter.com/zuihulu ) cautioned that its “stability and speed” are still not as good as commercial VPNs, while another, @YaxueCao, reminded followers that it “only offers you an open door, it won't protect you from surveillance”.

The threat of China's shadowy internet police infiltrating the network grows greater the more popular it gets, although they will be powerless to stop it spreading outside the Great Firewall.

Adam Fisk, president of Brave New Software, the non-profit that developed Lantern, was apparently one of the men behind popular P2P platform LimeWire: http://www.bravenewsoftware.org/

His new project has been given US$2.2 million (£1.3m) in seed funding by the US State Department, according to the paper.

Confounding optimism that president Xi Jinping would usher in a new era of more relaxed attitudes to online censorship, Beijing has been taking an increasingly hard line on web freedoms.

Despite Google exec president Eric Schmidt's prediction that global censorship could end in a decade, China's Supreme Court recently clarified that popular tweets spreading "online rumours" could land the sender with up to three years in jail.

Hmmm... It gets even stranger! After signing up to the beta and installing, this is what I got:

Sign in with Google

Signing in with Google allows Lantern to connect you to users in your social network, and not just anyone.

More info:Connecting to only users in your social network makes Lantern more secure and harder to block.

Your email address is kept private within your Lantern network and is used only for Lantern services. The only email Lantern will ever send you will be about important Lantern notifications, which you can unsubscribe from at any time.

You will be directed to Google to sign in. Lantern never stores or even sees your password.

Remember to use the email address you were invited with, or ask your inviter to invite you again with a different address.

(And that last one would be hard for me... I have catch all for domains and stuff ;p)

devnullius

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I do have to admit Samker found this program early... I'm the 30th user (total) to have tried this for the Netherlands.... IF those stats are correct. Hard to believe. Other countries are almost empty too! Some countries haven't even seen a user online...!

I don't know but this make me feel that Google is ones again working with the Chines government. to find contact net of dissident's to the government.

Look back a few years and you find that Google have country specific search engines for example China that give different search results for their peoples and log search activity to report to the government.

Hmmm... It gets even stranger! After signing up to the beta and installing, this is what I got:

Sign in with Google

Signing in with Google allows Lantern to connect you to users in your social network, and not just anyone.

More info:Connecting to only users in your social network makes Lantern more secure and harder to block.

Your email address is kept private within your Lantern network and is used only for Lantern services. The only email Lantern will ever send you will be about important Lantern notifications, which you can unsubscribe from at any time.

You will be directed to Google to sign in. Lantern never stores or even sees your password.

Remember to use the email address you were invited with, or ask your inviter to invite you again with a different address.

(And that last one would be hard for me... I have catch all for domains and stuff ;p)

devnullius

This parts was it that I made some association to that Google have some parts of this.

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Their is two easy way to configure a system!Every thing open and every thing closed.Every thing else is more or less complex.